My wife and I are angel investors – individuals who provide capital to start-up businesses in exchange for equity ownership. We typically invest at the very early stages of a company after friends and family have invested and before venture capitalists invest. Agile…
The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide defines an artifact by the name of “Increment.” This represents a renaming of an already existing Scrum artifact that historically was referred to as either “potentially releasable product increment” or a “potentially shippable product…
As I have written previously, organizations that adopt agile typically focus on applying agile within development or IT organizations (see Agile Adoption Across the Enterprise: Still in the Chasm, and Agile Misalignment Through the Enterprise Value Chain). As a result,…
For the past year and half, I have been coaching a very large company through its agile transformation. When I first started, I noticed that a particular expression was frequently used by several different people. The expression is “learn into it.”
I like this…
Many things can go wrong when organizations implement Scrum. And too often, the very leaders who pushed for an agile adoption are the ones who unwittingly create roadblocks and obstacles to its success. This article discusses 3 big mistakes I see leaders make when…
Planning for all contingencies in a complex environment is not realistic. Things frequently can and do go wrong. If all available resources have been fully allocated to complete the planned work, then when high-priority unexpected work (or more precisely, unplanned-for…
In the blog post, “Don’t Organize Around Projects! Choose a Better Unit of Focus to Eliminate Waste & Increase Agility,” I provided an overview of the desired set of characteristics for choosing an agile unit of focus—one that a company or organization could rally around…
When I engage companies on larger agile transformation efforts, one of the critical first steps is to define the proper unit of focus for budgeting, planning, and team organization. In this blog post I overview the characteristics that I use for determining a proper unit…
Recently I have had a lot of meetings and presentations with non-technical executive management where I describe the agile mindset. A core agile principle of this agile mindset is fast feedback.
In my presentations to technical people, I use technical examples to…
A sprint goal describes the business purpose and value of the sprint. The sprint goal is the foundation of a mutual commitment made by the development team and the product owner. The team commits to meeting the goal by the end of the sprint; the product owner commits to…